


Mother Bonesplitter's Children

by Fontainebleau



Category: The Author of the Acacia Seeds - Ursula Le Guin
Genre: Academic Study, Archaeology, Gen, Theriolinguistics, hyena
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:13:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21832744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fontainebleau/pseuds/Fontainebleau
Summary: An account of a paper presented at the Ninth Congress of Theriolinguistic Research in Sfax (2066): ‘Temporal Persistence of Mythemes in Written Hyena: evidence from cave den sites at Arcy-sur-Cure and Chlum-Komin’.
Comments: 45
Kudos: 121
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Mother Bonesplitter's Children

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lady_ragnell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/gifts).



> I first read 'The Author of the Acacia Seeds' many years ago, and when I saw your requests I reread it and thought that the prompt was just too good to pass up. And when I read your list of favourite animals, this idea sprang into my mind fully-formed! Thank you for such a great prompt, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
> 
> Thanks to my partner R and to the Yuletide discord for help with names.

**_International Journal of Archaeozooliterary Studies_ volume 1.1 (November 2066)**

**Note from the Editors**

To launch a new academic periodical is a bold undertaking in any circumstances, and the creation of a journal with the aim of fostering an entirely new discipline is an especially daunting prospect. Nevertheless we believe that the paper presented by Irena Jeleń at the Ninth Congress of Theriolinguistic Research in Sfax this summer carries such profound implications for our understanding of literature and history, and opens before our gaze so rich and potentially transformative a field of study that it is imperative for us as scholars to rise to the challenge. Hence our decision to launch this new journal in so short a timeframe: there can be no delay in bringing this sudden flowering of innovative research to the attention of the global theriolinguistic community. 

We are particularly pleased to be able to include as the opening contribution to this inaugural edition a revised and extended version of Ms Jeleń’s remarkable paper, ‘Temporal Persistence of Mythemes in Written Hyena: evidence from cave den sites at Arcy-sur-Cure and Chlum-Komin’; and since one of our editorial board, Martin Ortega, Professor of Theriolingustics at UNAM, was fortunate enough to be in the audience at its presentation, we are sure it will be of interest to future scholars to include here a first-hand account of the paper’s immediate reception. 

**DL** : Was there any sense before the session began of the explosive content of Ms Jeleń’s paper?

 **MO** : Not at all. She was presenting in a group session, PhD students who’d been invited to give short papers summarising their research: I was only there myself because one of my own postgraduates, Peter Huong, was giving a talk on his comparative work on slow poetry in Sloth and Tortoise. Jeleń’s an archaeologist, not a theriolinguist, which was left-field to begin with, and her title hardly seemed exciting: Hyena’s not been fashionable for a long time – most of the serious work in the last few years has been in the various forms of Bird, since the translation of the Starling Arias. So the hall wasn’t more than half-full when she got up to speak. 

And to be honest, when she started off, what she was saying wasn’t at all groundbreaking: the discovery of spoken Hyena’s a well-known story from the first wave of theriolinguistic translation. She told us about Nyangau recognising Hyena as a variant form of Canine, related to Painted Dog and Coyote – I’m sure all of us have consulted his _Fieldworker’s Glossary of Canine Languages_ at some time or another – then she took us through Gujić and Singh’s work on written Hyena: all those years when researchers thought the hyena clans’ libraries were just spoil heaps of gnawed bones and whole archives were scattered and lost, then the rush to catalogue the remaining collections in their pristine form and transcribe the stories they recorded. 

**DL** : That’s right: I still remember the excitement there was when the big archives were recovered in Kenya and Zambia, back when I was a postdoc, and what are now the Hyena classics were published – _Mother Bonesplitter and her Vengeance_ , _The Striped Howlers_ and _The Coming of the Strange Brother_.

 **MO** : Well, up to that point nobody had been paying too much attention, but then Jeleń put up a new photograph of a clan archive, and even with the little Hyena I have you could see there was something odd about it. It was clearly a library, though, from a cave in the Czech Republic, and when she told us the date, that it was at least thirty thousand years old, well, this little murmur went up all round the room. And honestly, I’d never had any idea, I don’t think any of us had, that there were so many prehistoric hyena dens which had been documented. 

Jeleń said that the fact that any attention was paid to them at all was somewhat ironically an artefact of human archaeology, because Paleolithic cave sites like the ones she studied were inhabited by both human and hyena bands: as early as the 2010s researchers demonstrated that den sites were often shared seasonally as each group moved to follow its preferred prey. Obviously the archaeologists in the early part of the century had no notion of what they were looking at – the libraries were described as prey deposits, and the gnawed bones were actually catalogued as ‘nibbling sticks’ for juveniles – but it was plain as day that what she was showing us was written Hyena in a primitive form. 

By that stage everyone was sitting up and getting excited – you could see people in the audience tapping away at their interfaces to tell their friends to come and listen to her too. And in itself that would have been remarkable enough, but then she switched to some close-up images showing the layout and articulation of the libraries from the two sites: the format was simple and underdeveloped, but, as she said, the layering in the deposits was clearly an early form of archiving. And then she just brought up slide after slide, showing us unmistakable references to the figures we know from present-day Hyena: Mother Bonesplitter, the Day Thief, the Howlers, all of them. The whole rich Hyena mythology already in existence, tens of thousands of years ago. 

**DL** : It must have been a jawdropping moment: after all, if written Hyena literature can be traced back that far, then obviously it calls into question the entire Prehistoric/Historic divide.

 **MO** : Exactly. Well, the room had filled right up by that stage, there were people standing round the sides and crowding in at the door, and everyone talking among themselves and waving their hands to ask questions: Jeleń was the only person in the room keeping her cool. Eventually the chair called for silence to let the presentation finish, but you could have cut the tension with a knife. 

**DL** : At this point I’ll let Ms Jeleń speak in her own voice, as her words have already been so often quoted: 

> _My research hints at two further intriguing possibilities. First, if we can detect such extensive traces of written Hyena in the tenth millennium BP, it must lead us to ask, were hyena the only animals to write so early? May there be other languages still to be found in the archaeological record, frozen in stone or preserved in amber, written in bones or shell fragments, waiting to be recognised for what they are?_

> _And second, what are the implications of this discovery for our understanding of human history? Human literatures, such as they existed at this period, were entirely oral: writing was not to appear until the fourth millennium BP. In these shared den sites, however, where humans and hyenas lived side by side, the archives show no signs of disturbance or despoiling, suggesting that our ancestors, encountering the hyena’s bone libraries, may have recognised them in some way for what they were. Can it be a coincidence that the earliest forms of graphic communication among humans, cave paintings and engravings on bone or antler, appeared at precisely this period? Was it in fact the cave hyena who first sparked in us the idea of preserving and recording stories, making them the progenitors of all human writing?_

**MO** : After she finished there was a moment of complete silence as the implications of what she’d said sank in; then everyone started talking at once, and one or two people stood up and bolted for the door – you could see the calculation in their expressions, dashing off to the osteoarchaeology collections to find what we’d all been missing. But most of the audience stayed to crowd up around her, going back to this or that image to examine the marks and ask questions about depositional methods and identifications; but there didn’t seem to be any doubt that what she was claiming was sound. 

Then Brochet got to his feet, Claude Brochet from Lausanne, and scowled round until he’d glared everyone else into silence; then he boomed at her, ‘Are you seriously suggesting that all human culture is descended from hyenas?’

It’s never been a secret that he had sympathies with the old Human Supremacist Movement; it was like being at the Darwin trial all over again, but give Jeleń credit, she stood her ground. She told him, ‘If you choose to put it like that, then yes, I think the implications are inescapable.’ 

Brochet drew himself up like an Old Testament prophet and declared, ‘I refuse to accept that our entire heritage of literary culture, everything that makes us unique, should be laid to the credit of a pack of scavengers!’ 

Everyone turned to look at Jeleń, to see how she’d take it, but she just smiled, completely calm, and said, ‘I think you’ll find that we’re all Mother Bonesplitter’s children.’

 **DL** : As I said, it’s rare to experience an event which turns out to be so revolutionary: the field of archaeozoolinguistics was born that day, and this first issue of the _International Journal of Archaeozooliterary Studies_ contains the initial reports of new collaborative projects between archaeologists and theriolinguists inspired by Ms Jeleń’s work, which promise to bring yet more profound discoveries: Adler describes hints of archaic Bison in the indistinct outlines of cave painting; Balik and Riekko make a tentative identification of several forms of Fish captured in sedimental fossils; Zhuravlev writes of an astonishingly rich trove of ancient written Bee in a collection of amber at the Kaliningrad Museum; and of course we include a preliminary but hugely exciting discussion by Taube and Coelho of approaches to Dinosaur, as yet theoretical, but bearing the prospect of unlocking a window onto a truly unguessable past. 

This volume ends with a postscript engaging with the arguments raised by Brochet, now one of several voices arguing that we, humanity, cannot but be diminished by this discovery: first we believed we were the only animals to speak, then when we found that was untrue, that we were the only animals to write; and now we discover that we were not even the first story-tellers. But with all we have learnt of the astonishingly various and vibrant cultures of our fellow animals, should it be so surprising to discover that, though we developed our own form of Chimpanzee and invented ingenious ways to preserve it, we came as latecomers to the world of literature? Surely it can only be to the good if, instead of insisting on human precedence and superiority, we learn to take our place in the den at the feet of Mother Bonesplitter, all of us cubs together in that immeasurably distant past?

Dorota Lagorio, University of Sydney  
Martin Ortega, UNAM

**Bibliography**

C.G. Diedrich and K. Zak, ‘Prey deposits and den sites of the Upper Pleistocene hyena _Crocuta crocuta spelaea_ (Goldfuss, 1823) in horizontal and vertical caves of the Bohemian Karst (Czech Republic)’, _Bulletin of Geosciences_ 81.4 (2006) 237-276.

C.G. Diedrich, ‘Von eiszeitlichen Fleckenhyänen benagte Mammuthus primigenius (Blumenbach, 1799) -Knochen und -Knabbersticks aus dem oberpleistozänen Perick-Höhlenhorst (Sauerland) und Beitrag zur Taphonomie von Mammutka-davern’, _Philippia_ 12(1), 63–84.

J.G. Enloe, ‘Middle Paleolithic cave taphonomy: discerning humans from hyenas at Arcy-sur-Cure, France’, _International Journal of Osteoarchaeology_ 22 (2012) pp.591-602.

J. Ford, ‘Hyenas and Neanderthals in the British Middle Paleolithic’, PhD thesis project, University of Sheffield.

E.L. Jimenez et al., ‘Cordial co-existence, competition, or avoidance strategies? Understanding the human ecological niche through the palaeoecology of the top-predators in northwestern Europe during the Late Pleistocene’, presentation given at the Seventh Annual Meeting of the European Society for Human Evolution, Leiden 2017.

L. Summerill, ‘Gnawed bones tell tales’, _Arizona State University Research Magazine_ Summer 2003, pp.34-37.


End file.
